Once in a Lifetime

Remember swinging for hours in the back of your Great Aunt's house inventing playmates out of your stuffed animals? Remember how much your eyes hurt from all the chlorine at the end of every summer day? Remember the smoke from the barbecue and the apartment elevator that someone would always get stuck in at least once a year? Remember how good Play-doh tasted?

Remember taking the bus home and feeling incredibly worldly? Remember learning all the words to Hair? Remember thinking that Rick Springfield and Grease and Shaun Cassidy sucked? Remember three-way phone calls? Remember boys with names like Jerry, Brad, and Marco?

Remember how much you loved The Talking Heads? Remember your gay high-school English teacher who was the brother of Captain Beefheart? Remember getting arrested at the Glendale Galleria for having what you thought was speed but which actually turned out to be No-Doz? Remember trying to pierce your nose and chickening out?

Remember how little you slept in the dorms and how ridiculous everyone seemed? Remember failing German twice simply because you couldn't make it to class every day? Remember driving to Baja in a rented LTC and having to loose your watch to the policia? Remember the political rallies, the feminist collective, the post-modern interpretation of The Investigation in which you acted and to which only five people came?

Remember the first boyfriend you lived with? And then remember the first time you lived alone? Remember buying that lemon of a car from the used-car salesman? Remember deciding being a vegetarian wasn't so important? Remember going back to school instead of getting a real job? Remember your first friends that got married?

Remember how long it took to finish graduate school, how long it took to finish your film, and how much money you were in debt by the end of it all? Remember your first friends that had kids? Remember all the people who moved away? Remember how dinner parties became so much more fun than going out? Remember your first friends that got divorced? Remember those that took the day jobs and those who stayed as the starving artists?

Remember your parents becoming grandparents? Remember your first gray hair? Remember how happy reading The New Yorker in bed made you? Remember realizing how little any more you went out to see music, go to bars, or hear poetry as read by your friends in some off-the-beaten track cafe/laundromat? Remember how nice a cup of coffee, mornings and the porch became?